Permitting platforms in the AI era, compared

Issue No. 12 · Tuesday, October 20, 2026 · By Scott Olsen

PULL UP A CHAIR

Something has been on my mind lately, and I haven't had time to run it by all my friends working in local government, so treat this as me thinking out loud with all of you first.

Every tool I covered below today is built and sold by an outside vendor. My old office, like most small offices, never had a software developer or anyone with real development experience on staff, so we leaned on outside vendors for development, every build, every customization, every upgrade. A smaller IT shop just does not have room for an in-house build team.

"Vibe coding," using AI tools to build working software just by describing what you want in plain language, is starting to change what is possible for someone with zero coding background. The example I had in mind is ArtCraft, built by a single developer in Atlanta who says he used Claude to build stand-ins for Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects, and InDesign, then kept going and built equivalents for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel too. I have watched people use it in real workflows on YouTube, and it works, though the developer has already walked back an early claim of full feature parity within weeks to a more realistic "months, not years," and independent testers say it is not that close yet. Worth knowing too, at least one intellectual-property law academic has called the legal status of this kind of AI-assisted replication a genuinely open question, not a settled one. It is not an isolated stunt either, there is now a small, growing directory of other independently built, AI-coded stand-ins for other paid software, so this is starting to look like a pattern, not a one-off.

My question for the group: has anyone started vibe coding in local government? Using some of the popular AI tools, not necessarily to reverse-engineer anything fancy, but to cut a vendor out of the budget because you can build something similar in-house? If your office has tried it, even informally, I want to know what it actually looked like. Did it change how you hire, or who you hire? Did it change what you ask a vendor to prove before you sign a contract? Did it change your day-to-day at all, or did it stay a side experiment nobody ever put in front of the board?

Vibe coding did not really take off until after I left government, so I never got to test it against the restrictions, procurement rules, and liability questions that come with the job. I will say I have been dabbling myself since, pushing further outside my own normal limits than I expected to, and it has me genuinely wondering how that would have changed my role if I were still sitting at the clerk's office today.

If you have an answer, even a partial one, hit reply. I would rather print a real answer from someone doing this than guess at one myself.

THIS WEEK'S PICK

Permitting platforms in the AI era, compared

Permitting is one of the oldest bottlenecks in local government, and it is where AI vendors are pushing hardest right now. I looked at four platforms that show up again and again in small-office conversations: OpenGov, Accela, Tyler EnerGov, and Cloudpermit. None of them publish a price list, all four are quote-based procurement, and the AI claims on their own marketing pages range from genuinely shipped to still mostly roadmap. Here is what actually held up.

IF YOU ARE A SMALL TOWN WITH A SMALL BUDGET

Cloudpermit has the most convincing small-office track record of the four

Cloudpermit's own named customers skew genuinely small: the Town of Altavista, Virginia (about 3,400 people) and the City of Garnett, Kansas (about 3,200) are both named, confirmed users, alongside a list of other small towns and townships. It also carries two real AI features confirmed directly on the vendor's site: NoVa AI, a round-the-clock assistant for staff and residents, and AI Cloudcheck, which flags problems in a submitted document before an applicant ever hits send. I could not find independent press coverage of either feature outside Cloudpermit's own site, so treat them as vendor-confirmed rather than independently verified. NoVa AI has several dedicated pages and is clearly current product. AI Cloudcheck is a thinner claim, it showed up in an earlier pass through Cloudpermit's navigation menu but I could not independently relocate or confirm it on a follow-up check, so treat it as unconfirmed as of this writing and ask to see it live in a demo rather than assuming it is there.

Cost: no published price list, quote-based     Setup: request a demo through cloudpermit.com

IF YOU WANT A MODERN, UNIFIED SYSTEM AND SOME SIZE TO GROW INTO

OpenGov's AI features are the most specifically documented of the four, with a catch

OpenGov names four distinct AI pieces on its own site: OG Assist, AI Pre-Check and AI Intake Review, which flag gaps before staff ever touch the file, and AI Plan Review, which marks code issues directly on the submitted plan. OpenGov's own pages are not fully consistent on what OG Assist specifically does, one page frames it as pre-submission guidance to the right permit, another as an in-page Q&A assistant, so treat its exact scope as still settling rather than fixed. This set was announced in April 2026 with a staged rollout that was supposed to run through September. That window has technically closed by the time this issue runs, though I could not independently confirm every piece is fully live for every customer yet, so ask to see it live before assuming it is finished rolling out. OpenGov's own case studies name Lauderdale Lakes, Florida and Starkville, Mississippi as customers, both smaller or mid-size towns, not just big-city logos.

Cost: no published price list, quote-based     Setup: request a demo through opengov.com

IF YOU WANT DEEP, ESTABLISHED WORKFLOWS AND HAVE THE BUDGET

Accela is the real thing, but its AI layer is partly still being built

Accela's CivicAI is marketed around transparency and full audit trails for anything AI touches, a real strength if your board or your auditors ask hard questions about AI accountability. Read the vendor's own page closely, though, and several of those capabilities are described in future tense, "being designed," "being engineered," not "available now." That is a fair signal that part of this is still roadmap. On straight cost, this is the platform with the clearest real numbers, because actual government board documents are public: Los Gatos, California, a town of about 33,000, paid roughly $250,000 to $294,000 for implementation. San Leandro, California's contract history runs from an $80,940 single-year renewal in 2018 to a five-year renewal in 2020 totaling $567,946.42, averaging a little over $113,000 a year. Scope and contract length vary a lot between offices, so treat these as real examples of the range, not a number to expect for your own office.

Cost: no price list, but real contracts range from roughly $80k a year to $300k for implementation, depending on scope and city size     Setup: request a demo through accela.com

HOW TO ACTUALLY USE IT

1.  Figure out your real budget tier before you take a single demo. These range from a Cloudpermit deal a small town can afford to an Accela contract that can run into six figures, and the sales conversation goes very differently depending on which one you are actually shopping in.

2.  Ask every vendor to demo the specific AI feature live, on a real document, not a slide with a screenshot. Several of these capabilities are genuinely shipped and several are still rolling out, and the only way to tell which is which from your side of the table is to watch it actually run.

3.  Ask for references from offices your own size, not the vendor's flagship big-city logo. A platform that works well for a city of 500,000 does not tell you much about how it runs for a staff of four.

4.  Get real numbers in writing before you walk into a board meeting. None of these four vendors publish a price list, so the figure you are quoted is the only one you have, and it is worth pinning down early rather than discovering scope creep after a vote.

The honest catch: every one of these four vendors uses the word "AI" on its homepage. Only two of them, OpenGov and Cloudpermit, describe specific, named AI features in present tense on their own sites. Accela's page leans future tense for its most audited claims, and Tyler's AI claim could not be pinned to anything specific at all. Marketing copy and a shipped feature are not the same thing, ask which one you are actually buying.

THE RULEBOOK · TWO RULES WORTH A GLANCE

What changed that affects how your office can use AI. Short, plain, and sourced. The part that keeps you out of the newspaper. Tagged Local for a city or county action, State for a change at the state level, Federal for a change at the federal level that reaches your desk. Both items below adopted earlier this year but are new to this newsletter, this was a quiet week for brand-new state and local AI action specifically.

ONE MORE QUICK WIN

Before you sign anything, ask your vendor which AI features are live today versus still rolling out

This applies well beyond permitting software. Any AI feature a vendor pitches you deserves one direct question: is this live for every customer today, or still in staged rollout. Get the answer in writing if the feature is a real reason you are signing the contract.

Know someone at another city or county who could use this? Forward it over.

Until next week,

Scott Olsen, CGCIO

Former CIO with eleven years in Florida local government

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Practical guidance for local government, not legal or procurement advice.